Measurement of pain
- Introduction
- Forms of measurement
- Need to measure pain
- News based on the description of the patient
- Measures submitted to single size
- Verbal Numerical Scale (VNS)
- Descriptive reports multidimensional
- The maps of pain
- Self: The use of descriptive terms
- Psychophysical measurement
- Bibliography
The pain often makes the patient unfit physically and emotionally by both cluttering and subvert the behavior of the sore subject. The pain prevents you from thinking coherently and induces the patient to seek treatment or relief.According to a reliable model, the pain consists of four components, namely nocicezione, feeling, suffering, and behavior. The term pain is a generic name given to all kinds of unpleasant experiences. The actual perception of this state is based on a list of modifying factors, ranging from memory of previous painful events to psychological influences, including the state of stress, alteration in mood, the expectation of treatment and the hope of healing. The pain is not merely sensory experience, but rather the result of an elaboration turning to the next level. The brain is not a mere reservoir of afferent nerve, sensory or pain, but a computer of these inputs.With regard to diagnostic tests, doctors deem appropriate and useful, in substantial agreement between them, 18 common methods of examination and diagnosis, such as standard radiography, CT scan and electromyography. However, there is little consensus and little empirical basis on which to rely in choosing the most suitable instrument for measuring pain. The measurement of pain is evolving, the categorization has changed and methods have been developed and refined.From a clinical point of view is often impractical to examine the relationship between nocicezione and response to pain, because in certain pain syndromes (phantom limb or trigeminal neuralgia), the original stimulus is absent. Consequently, in order to assess the experience of pain, measurement tools have been traditionally based on subjective data, placing the emphasis on feeling, on the suffering and the behavior of the patient rather than on nocicezione.
